© Pemotret | Dreamstime.com

Sometimes good things happen to good people.

Paul Krugman of Princeton University and the NYTimes, frequently quoted in this space, was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics today.

This is worthy recognition to an outstanding thinker, who not only thinks the deep thoughts of his “dismal science,” but articulately delivers complex concepts with clarity.

Well done, Nobel committee, and Paul Krugman!

—————–

Last post, I spoke in glowing terms of one of my favorite progressive blogs, First Door on the Left.

Len did it again today (recognizing Paul Krugman, by the way) by posting the complete transcript of Barack Obama’s fleshed out economic rescue plan delivered in Ohio today.

A Rescue Plan for the Middle Class

Posted by Len on Monday at 1:19 pm in Democrats, Election 2008, Politics

I know these are difficult times. I know folks are worried. But I also know this – we can steer ourselves out of this crisis. Because we are the United States of America. We are the country that has faced down war and depression; great challenges and great threats. And at each and every moment, we have risen to meet these challenges – not as Democrats, not as Republicans, but as Americans.

We still have the most talented, most productive workers of any country on Earth. We’re still home to innovation and technology, colleges and universities that are the envy of the world. Some of the biggest ideas in history have come from our small businesses and our research facilities. It won’t be easy, but there’s no reason we can’t make this century another American century.

But it will take a new direction. It will take new leadership in Washington. It will take a real change in the policies and politics of the last eight years. And that’s why I’m running for President of the United States of America.

My opponent has made his choice. Last week, Senator McCain’s campaign announced that they were going to “turn the page” on the discussion about our economy so they can spend the final weeks of this election attacking me instead. His campaign actually said, and I quote, “if we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” Well Senator McCain may be worried about losing an election, but I’m worried about Americans who are losing their jobs, and their homes, and their life savings. They can’t afford four more years of the economic theory that says we should give more and more to millionaires and billionaires and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. We’ve seen where that’s led us and we’re not going back. It’s time to turn the page.

Over the course of this campaign, I’ve laid out a set of policies that will grow our middle-class and strengthen our economy in the long-term. I’ll reform our tax code so that 95% of workers and their families get a tax cut, and eliminate income taxes for seniors making under $50,000. I’ll bring down the cost of health care for families and businesses by investing in preventative care, new technology, and giving every American the chance to get the same kind of health insurance that members of Congress give themselves. We’ll ensure every child can compete in the global economy by recruiting an army of new teachers and making college affordable for anyone who wants to go. We’ll create five million new, high-wage jobs by investing in the renewable sources of energy that will eliminate the oil we currently import from the Middle East in ten years, and we’ll create two million jobs by rebuilding our crumbling roads, schools, and bridges.

First Door on the Left » A Rescue Plan for the Middle Class

Click the link above, and read the entire speech. And, if you care to, Len has posted the video.

Details and substance in a statesman’s package. It’s not that much of a stretch: noble.

The contrast with the shrill, desperate bleating from the Republican opposition couldn’t be more stark.

Obama calmly talks numbers, carefully researched and thoughtfully delivered.

McCain and the redneckette shout what most voters are accurately recognizing as Faux News/talk radio inaccuracies, and more telling, irrelevancies.

“The only thing to fear is fear itself.” And McCain/redneckette are fearmongers of the classic, Republican stripe.

Citizens: On Nov. 4, cast your decisive vote against fear.

Sen. Obama: Now, make some room for a recent Nobel prize winner on your advisory team.

It’s it for now. Thanks.

–MUDGE

© Kandasamy M | Dreamstime.com

A very long day today (the alarm went off at 3:10am!), but hey, recycling is IN, right?

We’re all about doing the right thing here at Left-Handed Complement, and in that spirit we’re recycling some of yr (justifiably) humble svt‘s favorite electrons. And, with nearly 470 fresh daily posts in the past 16+ months, the recycling process has an exceptionally rich vein to mine.

I hereby stop apologizing for observing the prime directive of blogging: Thou Shalt Blog Daily!

And, I’m guessing that most of you weren’t here nine months ago. As one of my favorite paper publications used to say as they flogged unsold back issues: “If you haven’t read it yet, it’s new for you!”

Blast from the Past!

A post we really, really loved to write, and read, and re-read…

From last fall, originally posted November 11, 2007, and truer now than ever, titled “mm190: U. S. Health Care – Excuses, not facts.”

MUDGE’S Musings

Access to affordable health care. Five words. Easy to write. Rolls off the keyboard fluidly even. Simple phrase; political cesspool. Can universal access to affordable health care ever happen in the U.S.?

Paul Krugman, the economist whose columns appear in the Opinion section of the NYTimes, this week reminds us that the failings of our health care system are manifest: we spend more, but get less – fewer covered and lower life expectancy than in any other western economy.

Moreover, the usual suspects (our lifestyle) and the usual bugbears (socialized medicine!) are distortions and outright lies.

By PAUL KRUGMAN | Published: November 9, 2007

The United States spends far more on health care per person than any other nation. Yet we have lower life expectancy than most other rich countries. Furthermore, every other advanced country provides all its citizens with health insurance; only in America is a large fraction of the population uninsured or underinsured.

For those fortunate enough to have health insurance, premiums keep rising, and employers are beginning to push employees to pay more of the freight, or even to start to pay additional for their lifestyle choices.

For example, several cases have hit the news recently where employers have fired, or failed to hire, otherwise qualified people who are smokers.

Aside from the disturbing privacy concerns, the entire concept of group insurance (where the large numbers of average members in good health balances those few with greater needs) is at risk here.

But, as Krugman tells us, what apologists and politicians like Rudy Giuliani have done is blanket us with excuses, not solutions, and inaccurate and downright wrong excuses at that.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Health Care Excuses – New York Times

As a reluctantly, increasingly active consumer of the U.S. healthcare system, one of the luckiest ones covered through a plan 80% subsidized by my employer, I take for granted that I see medical professionals regularly, for the cost of a nominal co-pay up to that 20%. For what is spent, my experience should be the rule and not exceptional.

Armed with Paul Krugman’s excuse-busters, let’s all work to shed light to undo all of the misinformation out there on this subject.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

© Ian O hanlon | Dreamstime.com

As some observers have noted after the two conventions, there were lots of distractions, lots of words, but not much in the way of substance.

Especially regarding this nation’s number one concern.

Iraq, you ask?

That’s so 2007.

No, it’s the economy — rather, the very dangerous state of the economy.

Our Republican friends, plutocrats, or plutocrat wannabe’s, don’t believe we have a problem. McCain is and has always been insulated from the real world by, first, years as a Naval officer, where the pay might not be royal but subsidized expenses are low; then years as a prisoner of war, where the cost of living takes on an entirely ugly but non-financial meaning; then many more years as a Senator, married to wealth, a combination as isolated from the real world as it gets. He relies on his good buddy and close advisor on topics economic, former colleague Phil Gramm of Texas, who believes we’re all whiners.

The Democrats talked a spectacularly good ball game, but had little substantive to offer us.

Even so, based on their track record, one has to believe that the Democrats are more likely to get it than the Republicans, who have spent the last eight years aiding and abetting the liars and thieves on Wall Street and beyond.

Meanwhile, the news, and its import, is grim and becoming even more so.

The Power of De

Op-Ed Columnist | By PAUL KRUGMAN | Published: September 7, 2008

Save the home lenders, save the world? If only it were that simple.

The just-announced federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant mortgage lenders, was certainly the right thing to do — and it was done fairly well, too. The plan will sustain institutions that play a crucial role in the economy, while holding down taxpayer costs by more or less cleaning out the stockholders.

But Sunday’s action needs to be seen in a larger context — that of the attempt by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department to contain the fallout from the ongoing financial crisis. And that’s a fight the feds seem to be losing.

We’ve come a long way from the days when Alan Greenspan declared a national housing bubble “most unlikely.” There was indeed a bubble, and since it popped two years ago home prices have fallen faster than they did during the Great Depression.

You got that, friends? Home prices have fallen faster in the past two years than they did during the Depression!

Except of course for the plutocrat class, who are apparently insulated from such plebeian concerns.

This great bail out leaves the CEOs of Fannie and Freddy licking their wounds with millions in severance and outlandish pay over the past several years while they directed their organizations into insolvency, and is symptomatic of tough, ugly times ahead.

Op-Ed Columnist – The Power of De – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com

So strategic thinkers, like Paul Krugman, see parallels with Japan, a country that just spent over a decade in an economic funk, that our own current problems threaten to renew for them.

It’s time for some substantive strategic thinking on rescuing the nation from this economic crisis from our presidential candidates.

If I dare to repeat myself, it’s going to take a liberal quantity of BOLD.

Senator McCain’s version of bold is his typically impulsive and reckless choice for vice presidential candidate, a political and religious wingnut. Palin makes Tricky Dick Cheney look like an accomplished statesman. After all his hidden agenda is only oil. And oil money.

Senator Obama, the ball is in your court.

Give your country something to chew on: a real plan to pull this country away from the abyss.

If you make sense, if you give people the substantive means, not just hopeful words, to see light at the end of this gloomy tunnel, then you win.

If you won’t, then I’m very afraid that you will be handing the election to those who vote on superficialities, not issues.

And I’m very afraid that those superficialities will beat you.

It’s ugly, I know, but true.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

© Suhendri Utet | Dreamstime.com

MUDGE’S Musings

Can anyone still doubt our national (perhaps global?) economic distress? Runs on the banks. A tank of gas edging toward Benjamin territory. Someone you know (or mayhaps many someones you know) out of work and/or looking. Or giving up looking. Starbucks (Starbucks!) closing 600 stores.

Let’s have a show of hands: How many of you (U.S.) readers believe that this Spring’s tax refund “stimulus” could have been an order of magnitude larger (that’s 10 times), and still not been enough?  Two orders (that’s times 100)?

It doesn’t go away, our concern with the dire state of the economy.

Paul Krugman, economics professor and columnist of the NYTimes has been consistent in identifying our present financial dismay, and he has some grim news — it’s not going to get better very quickly.

L-ish Economic Prospects

By PAUL KRUGMAN | Published: July 18, 2008

Home prices are in free fall. Unemployment is rising. Consumer confidence is plumbing depths not seen since 1980. When will it all end?

The answer is, probably not until 2010 or later. Barack Obama, take notice.

It’s true that some prognosticators still expect a “V-shaped” recovery in which the economy springs back rapidly from its slump. On this view, any day now it will be morning in America.

But if the experience of the last 20 years is any guide, the prospect for the economy isn’t V-shaped, it’s L-ish: rather than springing back, we’ll have a prolonged period of flat or at best slowly improving performance.

This is the real deal, folks, upper case ‘R’ Recession. And our next president is going to find it’s why he was elected, and is going to be under the gun to do the many substantive actions (as opposed to the laughably symbolic “stimulus” just handed down by George III — let them eat cake, indeed!) necessary to kick the economy back into gear.

Op-Ed Columnist – L-ish Economic Prospects – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com

American consumers propped up the economy (that was hemorrhaging manufacturing capacity and blue color (and trade union) jobs at a ferocious rate) for most of George III’s benighted presidency by using the ever increasing value of their home equity as an ATM.

Housing prices continue to plummet, and Prof. Krugman believes that they will continue to do so for no less than three more years. The colorful economic term for that ugly state of affairs, where one’s mortgage obligation is larger than the home’s new value, is “upside down.” It feels like that large red arrow plunging into tender flesh.

Many of us have stopped spending on anything more than the basics: food (how high is up?); shelter (oh my God, I owe more than it’s worth!); gasoline for our guzzlers. No wonder Starbucks has suddenly become a luxury to be done without, rather than a daily necessity for so many.

When voters find themselves (in record numbers, if trends can be believed) confronting their presidential and legislative choices in their polling places this November, their economic well being will more than likely drive those decisions, more than any other issue.

Paul Krugman believes that their logical decisions will result in the election of Barack Obama, who represents a change, no matter of what degree, from those failed and the fraudulent custodians of the national economy who need to be swept out of power (my characterization not his!).

One can only hope that he and his brain trust aren’t so focused on the short term (i.e., November 4) that they’re not ready to start immediately to set their new government on a path that leads directly toward economic recovery, stat.

Hiring on expert, articulate, wise men like Paul Krugman would be an excellent beginning.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

MUDGE’s Musings

We’ve spent the past month or so watching the candidates come off their primary paces, attempting to rejigger their respective approaches to the general election, and taking some hits for the resulting adjustments.

The mishandled wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been top of mind for many voters since the pointless charade of “Mission Accomplished!”

Paul Krugman reminds us, however, of another paramount issue in this election, the economy, and what its dire condition means to John McCain.

Our current economic distress has been covered in this nanocorner of the ‘Sphere© quite frequently, most recently while highlighting this glass-half-full analysis from two senior Federal Reserve Bank officials. The U.S. economic juggernaut didn’t get to its current poor state by itself. President Bush, and his Republican allies in Congress can take plenty of the credit.

Behind the Bush Bust

Op-Ed Columnist | By PAUL KRUGMAN | Published: July 7, 2008

By huge margins, Americans think the economy is in lousy shape — and they blame President Bush. This fact, more than anything else, makes it hard to see how the Democrats can lose this election.

But is the public right to be so disgusted with Mr. Bush’s economic leadership? Not exactly. We really do have a lousy economy, a fact of which Mr. Bush seems spectacularly unaware. But that’s not the same thing as saying that the bad economy is Mr. Bush’s fault.

On the other hand, there’s a certain rough justice in the public’s attitude. Other politicians besides Mr. Bush share the blame for the mess we’re in — but most of them are Republicans.

For Krugman, our crummy economy has many causes, but three of the most important are the housing/mortgage bubble, the cost of health care and high commodity (fuel and food) prices. And the seeds to the crises in all of these areas were sown, if not on George III’s watch, then under the constipated purview of the six years of Republican Congresses that immediately preceded Bush’s presidency.

Op-Ed Columnist – Behind the Bush Bust – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com

Whatever his strengths might be, the economy has not been McCain’s area of expertise. As a result, he’s fallen back on knee-jerk Republican economic thought (cut taxes for the wealthy, and the rest be damned) that has led us into this all-but recession. We’ll let Paul Krugman have the last word:

And bear in mind that John McCain has gone to great lengths to affirm his support for Republican economic orthodoxy. So he’ll have no reason to complain if, as seems likely, the economy costs him the election.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Paul Krugman has appeared in this nanocorner of the ‘Sphere© quite frequently; he’s an economist, and an insightful writer, and a lot of news lately has been about our economy, and cries out for insight.

Since so much of the U.S. economy is driven by consumers, and has been, I’m imagining, since the end of World War II, when the bomber factories returned to stamping out annual cosmetic freshenings of shiny Fords, Plymouths and Hudsons to an eager population that couldn’t wait to “See the U.S.A in your Chevrolet,” consumer perceptions are a key indicator of economic health.

It’s no accident, I’m thinking, that the annual survey Krugman quotes, the Consumer Sentiment Index, comes out of the University of Michigan. Its Ann Arbor campus is nigh to the heart of that same automobile industry, and very little drives the economy like the sale of automobiles.

Pity that Detroit has taken so long to remember how to build a good car, but that’s a discussion for another time, or place.

Meanwhile, even Toyota sales are off… I’d say the consumer is downright depressed.

Crisis of Confidence

By PAUL KRUGMAN | Published: April 14, 2008

The Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan has been tracking American economic perceptions since the 1950s. On Friday the center released its latest estimate of the consumer sentiment index — and it was a stunner. Americans are more pessimistic about their situation than they have been for more than a quarter century….

Why are we feeling so down?

Our bleakness partly reflects the fact that most Americans are doing considerably worse than the usual economic measures let on. The official unemployment rate may be relatively low — but the percentage of prime-working-age Americans without jobs, which isn’t the same thing, is historically high. Gross domestic product is up, but the inflation-adjusted income of the median family is probably lower than it was in 2000.

Beyond that, perceptions of the current economy are strongly influenced by the public’s sense of the larger pattern.

Larger pattern. Let’s see: investment bank bail-outs. Foreclosures in a cul-de-sac near you. $zillion dollar payouts to executives who apparently couldn’t manage risk better than the sap plunging $50 his family needs for groceries on this week’s mega lottery. [Need I link to the quote? Not necessary. The lottery is a tax on people who failed to learn math.]

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Crisis of Confidence – New York Times

Mr. Krugman has been rather unimpressed over this presidential primary season with the candidates’ statements and position papers on the economy, and what they plan to do should the depressed public choose them come November.

The good news: should a Democrat win (and how odd it is to have to place this in the conditional), there could possibly be changes along the lines Krugman suggests: regulation with sincerity (mainly a joke these past 8 years); policies favoring labor (small ‘L’), perhaps ending some of the attractiveness of outsourcing and raising the minimum wage. Such steps could jolt us out of our doldrums, perceived and real.

Meanwhile, 300,000,000 doses of Wellbutrin, stat!

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Share this post :

del.icio.us it!

digg it!

reddit!

technorati!

yahoo!

Paul Krugman is frequently quoted here in this nanocorner of the ‘Sphere©, because he so frequently cuts through the obfuscation and clarifies economic realities. (See this post, and this one, for example.)

Today, the George III administration announced with great fanfare their latest financial system reforms.

Krugman looked it over. His conclusion: There’s no there, there.

The Dilbert Strategy

By PAUL KRUGMAN | Published: March 31, 2008

Anyone who has worked in a large organization — or, for that matter, reads the comic strip “Dilbert” — is familiar with the “org chart” strategy. To hide their lack of any actual ideas about what to do, managers sometimes make a big show of rearranging the boxes and lines that say who reports to whom.

You now understand the principle behind the Bush administration’s new proposal for financial reform, which will be formally announced today: it’s all about creating the appearance of responding to the current crisis, without actually doing anything substantive.

The financial events of the last seven months, and especially the past few weeks, have convinced all but a few diehards that the U.S. financial system needs major reform. Otherwise, we’ll lurch from crisis to crisis — and the crises will get bigger and bigger.

Did you really believe the guys who put the “lazy” into laissez faire capitalism” were really going to propose anything substantive, or even mildly helpful?

Nope, it’s all cosmetic, friends.

So, 34,000 workers on Wall Street have lost their jobs in the past nine months, but the partners and bosses of their former firms cashed out months ago, and have retired to upscale golf courses not near you.

So, people who thought they had finally bought a piece of the American dream are fleeing those homesteads just ahead of the sheriff, while the ghouls fly back from their Caribbean hideaways to buy up distressed real estate at pennies on the dollar, laying down the foundation for their next fortune.

Read somewhere that some lenders are quietly offering bounty payments (up to several thousand dollars) to foreclosed property (ex-) owners, so that they leave quietly, without doing what a significant minority are evidently doing, trashing the place on their way out.

So, the dollar’s in the toilet, sending the prices of luxury goods, such as gasoline and food, up, up, up.

Doesn’t bother those denizens of the golf courses, nor their minions in Washington, who just threw up another coating of obfuscation, pretending to do something while really not giving a damn about the other 99.6% of their fellow citizens.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

The Dilbert Strategy – New York Times

Are you finally angry? It’s about time.

In fact, as this is written, it’s only 296 days until a new administration takes over, and cleans house.

I hope we can wait that long.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Share this post :

del.icio.us it!

digg it!

reddit!

technorati!

yahoo!

Paul Krugman of the NYTimes is an economics professor who has a clear grasp of the big picture. Guess that would be macroeconomics, wouldn’t it?

And he has a way with words.

For yr (justifiably) humble svt, as a child of children of the Depression, its lessons were removed by time, heavily insulated by the cornucopia of plenty that followed the cleansing and rebirth that was World War II for the U.S.

Only those who were very young during the Thirties, certainly not policy makers, are around now, so it’s good that Prof. Krugman is here to teach us some important lessons.

Partying Like It’s 1929

By PAUL KRUGMAN | Published: March 21, 2008

If Ben Bernanke manages to save the financial system from collapse, he will — rightly — be praised for his heroic efforts.

But what we should be asking is: How did we get here?

Why does the financial system need salvation?

Why do mild-mannered economists have to become superheroes?

The answer, at a fundamental level, is that we’re paying the price for willful amnesia. We chose to forget what happened in the 1930s — and having refused to learn from history, we’re repeating it.

Contrary to popular belief, the stock market crash of 1929 wasn’t the defining moment of the Great Depression. What turned an ordinary recession into a civilization-threatening slump was the wave of bank runs that swept across America in 1930 and 1931.

It’s like this, children: after the banking debacles of 1930-31, that contributed directly to the global unrest that culminated in the war, the U.S. at least put into place checks and balances on the banking system to prevent recurrence of the calamities.

So Congress tried to make sure it would never happen again by creating a system of regulations and guarantees that provided a safety net for the financial system.

Our bankers, especially the mega-bankers of Wall Street, have spent the better part of the years since the Thirties first chafing under regulations, then finding sneakily legal workarounds.

Well, it caught up to them:

The financial crisis currently under way is basically an updated version of the wave of bank runs that swept the nation three generations ago.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Partying Like It’s 1929 – New York Times

Lately it seems that we all seem to looking over our shoulders.

We hear about some famous banking names taking hallucinogenic quarterly losses, bailed out by cash infusions from “sovereign wealth funds” (Saudi princes) and one get sold to another at pennies on the dollar.

We read the reports: oil at $109 (and gas at the pump certain to hit $4/gallon before long), the Euro at $1.59, gold over $1,000.

We watch the “For Sale” signs on our neighbors’ homes get old, and hear about declining values for housing and growing numbers of foreclosures nationwide, trends that threaten every middle class household’s economic stability.

We read about the Federal Reserve, whose last two (exalted) leaders let us get into this mess (if not caused it outright), and whose current one is an academic still getting his feet wet in the real world.

This is not a drill, Ben.

Buckle up, faithful reader, we may be in for a very bumpy ride.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Share this post :

del.icio.us it!

digg it!

reddit!

technorati!

yahoo!

The number crunchers are beginning to weigh in on the administration’s latest economic stimulus plan.

Can one really be surprised that the stimulus mainly impacts those who need it least?

Paul Krugman had the following observations in the NYTimes, and on his blog:

Stimulus Gone Bad

By PAUL KRUGMAN | Published: January 25, 2008

House Democrats and the White House have reached an agreement on an economic stimulus plan. Unfortunately, the plan — which essentially consists of nothing but tax cuts and gives most of those tax cuts to people in fairly good financial shape — looks like a lemon.

Specifically, the Democrats appear to have buckled in the face of the Bush administration’s ideological rigidity, dropping demands for provisions that would have helped those most in need. And those happen to be the same provisions that might actually have made the stimulus plan effective.

In his related blog (linked to in the Times, and full of a series of useful comments on the stimulus plan) he reproduces the chart that the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center created after analysis:

Predictable:the top 40% of income earners would get 58% of the proceeds. It’s just so typically wrong-headed. We’re headed toward rough seas; let’s take the motors off the lower-deck lifeboats, so that the upper deck lifeboats have two!

And the Democratic leaders in Congress, as has been typical for them since they assumed majority status after the 2006 elections, caved. No stomach for a fight, Ms. Pelosi? If not, you certainly are in the wrong place at the wrong time!

Krugman points out that getting money to people who really need it “does double duty: it alleviates hardship, and also pumps up consumer spending.”

The result: a program that isn’t helpful where most needed, and fails in its goal as an economic stimulus.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Stimulus Gone Bad – New York Times

You needn’t be a card-carrying curmudgeon to be disgusted.

I just love the FDR quote, at a time when spats-wearing plutocrats were desperately clinging to their customary piracy – er, business – as usual:

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.”

When will it end, you ask? timeanddate.com tells us: 360 days, 15 hours: Noon Eastern Standard Time, Tuesday, 20-January-2009.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Share this post :

del.icio.us it!

digg it!

reddit!

technorati!

yahoo!

On more and more minds, and lips, lately is that dreaded R-Word, recession.

First some news that we won’t have to work too awfully hard to relate to the topic at hand.

1. A critical gear in the export engine gets stripped

The aerospace competition between Europe’s Airbus and the U.S.’s Boeing has been hard-fought (think: Saturday-night saloon, brass-knuckles style) commercial dueling of a classic nature.

Boeing, complacent after lucrative decades owning global airline sales was embarrassed when upstart Airbus, an amalgam of several European aerospace firms unable individually to compete with the Boeing colossus began to outsell the arrogant giant.

Thus it was with no small satisfaction that Boeing watched Airbus announce delay after delay delivering its latest product, the immense 600-passenger A380, finally released to its first customers late in 2007.

Now, the shoe is on the other foot, as Boeing yesterday was forced to admit that its latest product, the new-age, environmentally sensitive 787 Dreamliner, has encountered delivery glitches of its own, the impact of which will push deliveries back to 2009.

Here’s the word from Boeing’s home-town paper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (sorry, Chicago Tribune, but Boeing’s head may have relocated, but its heart remains in Washington State).

Boeing explains new 787 delay

Company ‘underestimated’ time to finish partners’ work

By JAMES WALLACE
P-I AEROSPACE REPORTER

It was 90 days ago Wednesday that Boeing troubleshooter Pat Shanahan took over the 787 program after then-Dreamliner boss Mike Bair was sacked.

A week earlier, The Boeing Co. had announced an embarrassing six-month delay, with the first Dreamliner deliveries to airlines slipping from May until the end of 2008.

Boeing believed at the time that it would be able to complete work on the first plane in its Everett factory and have it flying by the end of March. It is the first of six that will be needed for the flight test program before the 787 can be certified by regulators to carry passengers.

The story rings true enough; the 787 is a new aircraft, being assembled a new way.

The 787 represents a new way of building airplanes for Boeing, which turned over most of the manufacturing and assembly work to key partners in Italy, Japan and elsewhere in the United States.

But those partners were unable to complete a significant amount of work before the unfinished sections of the first of six test-flight planes arrived in Everett for final assembly. Boeing has struggled to catch up on all this “travel” work.

Typical complexity issues, perfectly understandable, if disappointing.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Boeing explains new 787 delay

It will take a more adept macroeconomist than yr (justifiably) humble svt (not a very high bar to scale either) to tell us the effect of this delivery delay on the economy. Exports are an important piece of the economic pie, and Boeing a critical element of that slice.

Boeing sneezes, and we all should start looking around for our Nyquil.

2. Okay, it’s a recession. Which candidate makes the most sense?

There’s a presidential election campaign going on, you may have noticed.

NYTimes’ Paul Krugman, one of our favorite economic analysts, takes a look at their positions. Voters are getting nervous; tell us you know how to make us feel better:

Responding to Recession

By Paul Krugman | Published: January 14, 2008

Suddenly, the economic consensus seems to be that the implosion of the housing market will indeed push the U.S. economy into a recession, and that it’s quite possible that we’re already in one. As a result, over the next few weeks we’ll be hearing a lot about plans for economic stimulus.

Since this is an election year, the debate over how to stimulate the economy is inevitably tied up with politics. And here’s a modest suggestion for political reporters. Instead of trying to divine the candidates’ characters by scrutinizing their tone of voice and facial expressions, why not pay attention to what they say about economic policy?

In fact, recent statements by the candidates and their surrogates about the economy are quite revealing.

And he proceeds to get to the heart of each candidate’s economic sound bites.

• McCain: ruefully admits he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know about the economy
• Giuliani: his cure, a huge tax cut, isn’t
• Huckabee: just wrong
• Romney: who just might know something, won’t say anything, fearing to offend
• Edwards: driving the agenda with a clearly designed policy
• Clinton: following suit
• Obama: after an awkward false start, now has a plan, although less progressive than the other leading Dems

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Responding to Recession – New York Times

Can’t help but wonder what Michael Bloomberg thinks… Mike, Mr. self-made billionaire, what get’s us out of our funk, fast?

3. Recession: Bitter but necessary medicine?

Another of MUDGE’s favorite economists, Daniel Gross of Slate, weighs in on our looming distress, and how it could provide a wake-up call to U.S. business:

The Good News About the Recession

Maybe it will finally teach Americans how to compete globally.

By Daniel Gross | Posted Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2008, at 11:53 AM ET

A sign of the housing slump

A recession may be upon us, which would mean fewer jobs, declining tax revenues, and sinking consumer confidence.

But for some (congenital Bush-bashers, the Irvine Housing Blog, critics of rampant consumerism), the parade of bad news is an occasion for schadenfreude….

(By the way, schadenfreude is defined thusly. Admit it, you always wanted to know but never bothered to look it up. Sequitur Service© at your service!)

… They enjoy seeing inhabitants of the formerly high-flying sectors that got us into the mess—real estate and Wall Street—being laid low. Others hold out hope that a recession will iron out distortions in the housing market, thus allowing them to move into previously unaffordable neighborhoods. Some econo-fretters hold out hope that reduced imports and the weaker dollar—both likely byproducts of a recession—will help close the trade deficit. And a few killjoys believe recessions can be morally uplifting. “High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life,” as Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon put it in the disastrous aftermath of the 1929 crash and ensuing Depression. Not for him stimulus packages and enhanced unemployment benefits. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.” (Thanks in part to such comments, voters liquidated Republicans for a generation.)

With the exception of a few gleaming stars, like our friends Boeing, U.S. companies have been woefully ineffective at selling to global markets.

The world is running away from us. The volume of global trade in merchandise has been increasing rapidly. And it’s not just the United States importing goods from China. It’s China importing natural resources from everywhere and building infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa, sub-Saharan Africa buying oil from the Persian Gulf, Dubai investors purchasing Indian real estate, Indian builders buying German engineering products and services, and German engineers buying toys made in China. With each passing day, an increasing number of transactions in the global marketplace do not involve the United States. We’re still a powerful engine. But the world’s economy now has a set of auxiliary motors.

We know we’ve been floundering; the way out may well be to find business leaders with global skillsets.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

The good news about the recession. – By Daniel Gross – Slate Magazine

It’s going to be an uphill fight. We’ve earned our way into this economic distress: outsourcing our jobs instead of figuring out how to become competitive; living high on borrowed money that is now coming due big time; wasting geopolitical and real capital, and thousands of young American lives, on a poorly designed, inadequately executed, military misadventure in Iraq.

The R-Word

We hope you enjoyed this week’s three-part episode, and hope to heaven that we don’t have to do run too many more of them!

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Share this post :

del.icio.us it!

digg it!

reddit!

technorati!

yahoo!

Access to affordable health care. Five words. Easy to write. Rolls off the keyboard fluidly even. Simple phrase; political cesspool. Can universal access to affordable health care ever happen in the U.S.?

Paul Krugman, the economist whose columns appear in the Opinion section of the NYTimes, this week reminds us that the failings of our health care system are manifest: we spend more, but get less – fewer covered and lower life expectancy than in any other western economy.

Moreover, the usual suspects (our lifestyle) and the usual bugbears (socialized medicine!) are distortions and outright lies.

By PAUL KRUGMAN | Published: November 9, 2007

The United States spends far more on health care per person than any other nation. Yet we have lower life expectancy than most other rich countries. Furthermore, every other advanced country provides all its citizens with health insurance; only in America is a large fraction of the population uninsured or underinsured.

For those fortunate enough to have health insurance, premiums keep rising, and employers are beginning to push employees to pay more of the freight, or even to start to pay additional for their lifestyle choices.

For example, several cases have hit the news recently where employers have fired, or failed to hire, otherwise qualified people who are smokers.

Aside from the disturbing privacy concerns, the entire concept of group insurance (where the large numbers of average members in good health balances those few with greater needs) is at risk here.

But, as Krugman tells us, what apologists and politicians like Rudy Giuliani have done is blanket us with excuses, not solutions, and inaccurate and downright wrong excuses at that.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Health Care Excuses – New York Times

As a reluctantly, increasingly active consumer of the U.S. healthcare system, one of the luckiest ones covered through a plan 80% subsidized by my employer, I take for granted that I see medical professionals regularly, for the cost of a nominal co-pay up to that 20%. For what is spent, my experience should be the rule and not exceptional.

Armed with Paul Krugman’s excuse-busters, let’s all work to shed light to undo all of the misinformation out there on this subject.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE